Rosie Bingham Receives Sole Endorsement of D17 for APA President

Dr. Rosie Bingham has received the sole endorsement of the Society of Counseling Psychology, Division 17 of the American Psychological Association, for APA President.

Please consider giving her your #1 vote in the APA President election this fall of 2017.

Here is a statement from Dr. Rosie Bingham:

The Society of Counseling Psychology has been my home Division for decades. I am so honored and humbled that the Division endorsed me for APA President. I hope that you have read or will read my statements either in the APA Monitor or at www.rosiebinghanforapapresident.com. There you will see that I am asking us to Dream Big and Do More. In reality, counseling psychologists have been dreaming big and doing more for a long time. Our discipline began with us working to improve the lives of others, to work from their strengths, to help people develop full lives.

It was my distinct pleasure to serve as the Division’s first Vice President for Public Interest and Diversity as we deliberately worked to expand and enhance the diversity-focused work of the Division within APA and to provide more saliency for the work that we did in the academy and in the world. We established Sections and Special Interest Groups to reach out and involve more people. When I became President of SCP I knew we needed to focus on drawing people in, therefore my Presidential Address focused on “Exclusion is easier but inclusion is better; we must draw a bigger circle” with the goal of including everyone. Inclusion is where our power lies. You can read my entire address on my website at https://www.rosiebinghamforapapresident.com/single-post/2017/06/15/Rosies-1999-Division-17-Presidential-Address. The Division began to focus more intentionally on inclusion and social justice. We are still doing that. And APA must do that too. We are scientists and practitioners and understand that we are both…not one or the other. We must help to expand that view throughout APA and use our views and positions to solve real world problems. If elected, one of my initiatives will be to focus on “Deep Poverty.” We do not yet fully understand the sustaining impact on the lives of people who live in deep poverty. Nor do we understand enough about the intergenerational nature of deep poverty on lives of the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. We must begin to understand and act.

My parents were sharecroppers in Mississippi. They moved to Memphis when I was about 4 or 5 years old. Even when I was that young we all had work to do. In Memphis, my father was a garbage man and a part of the 1968 Sanitation Strike that was happening when Dr. King was killed. My mother cleaned houses for white women and earned 20 -25 dollars a week. My parents had 6 boys and 6 girls. I am number 5; their 1st together.

I have been married to my best friend, John Davis for 33 years and our son’s name is Akil. He is a struggling artist in New York. We are middle class, but just about everybody in our family is poor so our checks are family checks. I don’t understand why it is so hard to move the needle.

I work with poverty in our community. I am a founding member of the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis. Our mission is to help women and children reach their full potential. We work to help women reach economic sufficiency because we believe that if you help a woman you help her family. If you help the family, you help the community. If you help the community, you help the nation; you help the world. That’s all I want…to help the world. So Dream Big with me and Let’s Do More.